Design Notes: Beata Heuman

[bright music]

So I grew up in the countryside in Sweden.

There was one girl who was within walking distance.

Of course, I wasn't that popular in school,

so you had to kind of make your own fun.

I moved to London.

I was looking for something to do.

Actually enrolled in this interior design course,

and I wasn't really enjoying it,

and I was complaining to someone.

And that person happened to know Nicky Haslam.

She introduced me anyway, and he employed me straight away,

even though I didn't have any formal training.

And Nicky always gave us a lot of freedom.

He doesn't care at all

about what other people think about him.

He's sort of, he sets the rules, I guess.

And I really, I really admire that.

I like sort of pushing things a little bit,

and if people don't really understand it always,

that sort of almost,

that kind of almost inspires me to do it.

First feature was in House & Garden, which was amazing,

which was on my flat, which was pretty small.

[chuckling]

And in the beginning when that was published,

we did get a lot of work like that.

And I guess this flat that we're sitting in now

is a good example of that.

Everything is painted the same color

except for the study behind me.

And it's green, which is still quite a calm color.

And outside the windows, you have lots of trees.

But we didn't want anything too overpowering.

We wanted to keep it quite kind of calm and soft.

In a small space,

all these little details make a big difference.

My client bought a book on ballet costume design,

so we just took pages out of the book and framed them.

We thought about this frame with a pin stripe,

and then we have a special linen mount around them,

and actually making it into a bit of a feature.

[bright music]

So here, we had the radiator,

but we didn't want to lose any space.

So we found these brackets on Etsy,

and then we just made this shelf to sit above.

So it kind of works as a hall table when you come in,

and can put your keys on it.

So in a small flat,

it's important to create a lot of storage.

So here in the fireplace reveal,

we sort of blocked it in, and then lots of space

to put things away.

With a bedroom, you spend a lot of time there

and you want it to feel calm.

Kind of gives it a bit of life, but it's not overpowering.

[bright music]

When people ask me how to describe my style,

I always find it quite difficult to answer.

But I think it's sometimes,

it's almost good to put something in the mix

that doesn't really fit, almost that's a little bit off.

So that we shouldn't look too thought through or too styled.

[bright music]